Vatileaks: 1940 German Euthanasia Program for the Mentally-Ill Met With Almost Complete Acquiescence from German Catholic Hierarchy. Looking at the German Hierarchy's Collaboration with the National Socialists, the Russian Orthodox's Hierarchy's Cooperation with the Communists, and the American Hierarchy's Collusion with the US Government's Americanist Ideology, No Wonder the Murder of the Unborn has Gone on for Half a Century in this Country. High Level Academics and Psychologists Actively Cooperated. Nazis believed Militant Church Would Have Shut Down the Program.
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By looking at pp. 44-46 (of the pdf) of the recently uncovered CIA declassified document detailing the interrogation of Albert Hartl, an apostate priest who joined the German National Socialist Party in 1933, you will find an insider's account of the inaction and acquiescence of the German Catholic Hierarchy, along with the Papal Nuncio, in regards to Hitler's gassing of the mentally-ill, beginning in 1940. In other parts of this document, you can read the disheartening description of the spying that was done by priests, bishops, and monks on fellow Catholics to the German Secret Police. Granted many of these were apostates who had left the Church and the priesthood, BUT MANY WERE NOT. Many were members of Catholic faculties, religious instruction institutes, monasteries, and chanceries. Just as Pope Pius XI's Concordat with Hitler's Germany in 1933, signed for the pope by Cardinal Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) ---- granted this was in the last years of the Weimar Republic --- seemed to allow Catholics to lend their support to Hitler's government -- indeed, Hitler apparently believed that he would not have remained in power with this concordat with the Catholic Church --- it was the Catholic Church hierarchy's relative inaction and quietude with regard to the gassing of the mentally-ill which removed an obstacle to the Nazi's implementation of the plan. The reading of this section is difficult and heartrending. Surely the same can be said about the response of the bishops in 1969 to 1973 when abortion was being legalized in the United States. The reason given by Hartl for this inaction --- which surprised the government -- and this relative lack of opposition was because of the political "prudence" of the Church in its attempt to maintain contact with all the sides in the conflict of WWII (ie., the Western liberal democracies, the Soviet Communists, and the National Socialists and the Fascists) and, yet, not ally the Church with any of these, either officially or unofficially. I understand that the ship of state of the Catholic Church had to be steered between Scylla and Charybdis and the Cave of the Cyclopes, however, when an intrinsic evil and injustice was being done to the most vulnerable to keep silent was surely a matter of cowardice and pusillanimity, and let us say, slavishness to the State, which the clergy decide to "obey." Bishop von Galen's sermon was ineffective because he included talk of the euthanized including wounded war veterans, which did not strike the average German as something even the nutsy Nazis would do. From Herr Hartl's account, it does not seem like the gassing of the mentally-ill stopped until the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945.
I don't know what else to say.
Yes, more evidence that he Catholic Church should have nothing to do with politics because politics will always end up running the Church. All relationships with all governments must be ended. The Vatican state must be sacrificed. The Church must stand alone in the world against the powers of evil depending only on God for protection. Without a materially poor, politically powerless Church no spiritual.progress can be made. The Church is here to win minds, hearts and souls for Christ. Money and politics only destroy this process.
ReplyDeleteIn order for Jesus to be "King of kings," kings have to submit to the moral authority of the Church.
DeleteThe Catholic Church has always claimed a right for bishops and popes to directly and indirectly depose of despotic kings and dukes.
Pope Paul IV said Catholics can withdraw obedience from schismatic and heretical dukes and kings.
We don’t need to rid the pope of the tiara, all who claim to be Catholics, need to be Catholic!
No tiara for the Pope. To me it is the exact opposite of what Christ intended. The Pope should not have Peter reporting to him. "My Kingdom is not of this world".
DeleteDr. Chojnowski, any Catholic with a basic understanding of the Faith (or any normal person) must know that: "The putting to death of the deformed, the mentally defective and those suffering from hereditary disease, on the plea that they are a burden to themselves and upon society, is murder" and, as Pope Pius XII wrote in his Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (1943), "an outrage against the noblest instincts of mankind."
DeleteCardinal Pacelli was an enemy of Nazism even before he became Pope. The day after his election, the Berlin Morgenpost admitted: "The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor."
Those who attack Pius XII for his "silence", 80 years after the fact, are judging him blindly. They know nothing about what was going on and ignore the fact that Catholic bishops and Jewish leaders in Nazi-occupied countries advised him not to provoke the Nazis further.
Marcus Melchior, the former chief Rabbi of Denmark stated that: "It is an error to think Pius XII could have had any influence whatsoever on the brain of a madman. If the Pope had spoken out, Hitler would probably have massacred more than 6 million Jews and perhaps 10 times 10 million Catholics, if he had the power to do so."
A prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, Robert M.W. Kempner, said: "Every propaganda move of the Catholic Church against Hitler's Reich would have been, not only provoking suicide...but would have hasted the execution of still more Jews and priests." This proved to be especially true in Holland.
No other leader did more than Pius XII, who saved hundreds of thousands of human lives during the Nazi reign of terror. In his lifetime he was widely praised and honored by the Jewish community for opposing the Nazi onslaught.
One is not surprised and expects the Church's enemies to attack Pius XII, but what is reprehensible is when Catholics are doing the same and extending the Black Legend against the Church and this good Pope. One should concentrate on the vast majority of the courageous good clergy of the time and not the few bad ones.
Dr. Chojnowski, you said Bishop Von Galen's sermon was ineffective. Then why do some historians say otherwise? "The sensation created by the sermons was enormous". According to the British historian Sir Richard John Evans these protests led by Bishop Von Galen were "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the Third Reich."
ReplyDeleteAccording to another historian, Ian Kershaw, Von Galen's "open attack...was a vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism". Some of the priests who distributed the sermons were among those sent to the concentration camps. Fr. Bernhard Lichtenberg was arrested and murdered by the Nazis for endorsing Galen's sermons in a letter to the Nazi State Medical Director.
When Hitler was faced with the angry protests from the Germans, he halted the main euthanasia program in the summer of 1941 but still continued with a less systematic murder program underground. He also vowed that he would take revenge against the Church after the war and "extract retribution to the last farthing."
Dr. Chojnowski, why post such a suspicious article, especially when Catholic morale is at an all time low and the Great Apostasy in full swing?
Information such as this can only be distributed by a man who loves the truth above all else
ReplyDeleteno matter where it takes him. God bless you sir.